Hibernating Through Global Warming

Posted on 18. Feb, 2009 by Ross in Policy News

Energy efficiency is the hot topic in the policy lists of governments and corporations looking to save significant sums of money during the global depression, whilst still attempting to meet carbon dioxide emission targets. There are a set of first-instance, immediately enhancing investments that can be made in order to save energy costs, such as installing new or extra loft insulation and replacing old light fittings with substantially more efficient technology such as the Somar Eluma.

Recently, the energy used by computers has come into the spotlight as a new primary candidate for instant savings. Internet-based companies such as Google stand to make gargantuan energy savings from even the smallest efficiency gains across their massive data centres, but computers are now ubiquitous throughout businesses in every sector and every company stands to make financial gains by reducing energy consumption from PCs.

Companies stand to save on their energy bills by initiating a switch-off campaign in their workplaces, but such initiatives hinge on individuals taking personal responsibility for energy bills that they personally don’t have to pay. Identifying this as a potential marketplace, some companies and universities have created software packages which power down machines which are not in use, but these options already exist for free as part of the Windows operating system. By setting a machine’s power options to hibernate after a period of inactivity (30 minutes would be an advisable period), large energy savings can be made without investing in extra software or relying on the benevolence of the workforce.

Hibernation has clear benefits in comparison to the alternative options: sleep and shut down. Both sleep and hibernation store the computer’s current configuration ready for re-launch, the difference being that sleep mode stores it in the computers RAM whereas hibernation mode stores it on the hard drive. This has two important rammifications. Firstly, sleep mode doesn’t power the machine down completely, since RAM requires energy to maintain its’ state, therefore hibernation saves more energy than sleep mode. Secondly, in the event of a power cut or similar event, a computer in sleep mode would lose its’ state, putting at risk any unsaved information and forcing the need for a complete restart.

Hibernation leads to quicker restarts than a total shutdown, and its’ net hard drive usage is actually less than a full reboot, meaning that not only does it save as much energy but it also reduces wear on the computer’s most important component - its’ data. All three options ultimately present potential savings for businesses though: between